Challenging Geographical Disadvantages and Social Exclusion: A Case Study of Gendered Rural Transformation in Mountain Villages in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey

Date

2019-07-01

Author

Him, Miki Suzuki
Hoşgör, Hatice Ayşe

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

78
views

0
downloads

This article discusses the gender-specific effect of the changing economic structure of mountain villages in Turkey. Rural women, who are conventionally unpaid family workers, have begun entering into off-farm work due to declining household incomes in recent years. The implications of this for gender relations are found to be contradictory in much recent research. In this study, we employed the concepts of the hybridity of rural communities and the multiplicity of social exclusion in a globalising countryside. We used a qualitative methodology employing multiple sources of data. In addition to in-depth interviews with 27 village women, we conducted semi-structured interviews with village headmen and structured interviews with 218 village women to understand the structural context behind the women's narratives. We found that the dimension of social exclusion varies with gender and age within the community. While middle-aged men are increasingly unemployed and have withdrawn into uncompetitive rural life, young women engage in wage work and challenge geographical disadvantages by spending their meagre earnings on transportation and communication technologies. The reconfiguration of marginality within the community, rather than the total marginalisation of villagers, is an ongoing process.

Subject Keywords

Sociology and Political Science

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/47876

Journal

SOCIOLOGIA RURALIS

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12258

Collections

Department of Sociology, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Child Poverty and Youth Unemployment in Turkey Bayırbağ, Mustafa Kemal; Göksel, Asuman (Wiley, 2018-09-01) This article investigates the nature, causes, and consequences of child poverty and youth unemployment in Turkey, which is a transition country between the East and the West. It is argued that this in-betweenness leads to a gap between the intended goals and outcomes of relevant policies. The article places a special emphasis on how the post-1980 neoliberal turn has shaped the policy orientation of successive governments, and transformed the nature of child poverty and youth unemployment in Turkey, making t...
The European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans: Exclusion or integration? Türkeş, Mustafa (SAGE Publications, 2006-09-01) This article analyzes the European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans as a hegemonic project. The European Commission's strategy is neither total exclusion nor rapid integration. The Commission's aim is to restructure the Western Balkans in line with neoliberalism to prepare the region for the "preincorporation stage." The Commission's major initiatives show that this neoliberal restructuring need not end in full membership but remains an open-ended process. Two components of the Commission's form...
The Turkish Parliamentary Elite and the EU: Mapping Attitudes towards the European Union AKSIT, Sait; Şenyuva, Özgehan; Gurleyen, Isik (Informa UK Limited, 2011-01-01) This study aims to map out the opinions and attitudes of the Turkish parliamentary elite regarding Turkey's membership of the European Union in general and the future of Europe in particular. The parliamentary elite group consists of political party representatives present in the current Turkish Grand National Assembly. The study uses the findings of the Turkish Elite Survey 2009 conducted by the Center for European Studies, Middle East Technical University. The article argues that while Turkish parliamenta...
On consensus, constraint and choice: economic and monetary integration and Europe's welfare states Bolukbasi, H. Tolga (Informa UK Limited, 2009-01-01) This article reassesses the theoretical expectations and empirical findings in the political economy literature on the impact of economic and monetary union (EMU) on European welfare states. After summarizing the literature which views EMU as the symbol of the primordial conversion to neoliberalism, the article identifies the underlying hypothesis, assumptions, and predictions of the earlier, largely apprehensive literature of the 1990s which was based on ex ante convictions on EMU's social consequences. Th...
Transformed landscapes and a transnational identity of class: Narratives on (post-)industrial landscapes in Europe Meier, Lars; Aytekin, Erden Attila (SAGE Publications, 2019-01-01) Based on 222 qualitative interviews conducted through a large ethnographic research project on transformed industrial landscapes in six countries, the main argument of the article is threefold. First, landscapes and narratives about past and present landscapes are relevant to the identity of class; second, the transformation of industrial landscapes is most emphatically expressed by nostalgia; third, the narratives are a transnationally constitutive element of class identity. The narratives of workers about...

Citation Formats

M. S. Him and H. A. Hoşgör, “Challenging Geographical Disadvantages and Social Exclusion: A Case Study of Gendered Rural Transformation in Mountain Villages in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey,” SOCIOLOGIA RURALIS, pp. 540–559, 2019, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/47876.